The real quick spark notes are:
Iran tried to socialize their Oil Production as they believed that Irani's deserved more than 10% of the profit generated instead of just paying Britain forever. In response the CIA did a coup d'état and there's been instability ever since.
Naturally the US aligned itself with it's own oil company in the region (California-Arabian Standard Oil, which is now the Aramco) given that it had just made an enemy of Iran. I think a pretty weird quirk of history is that if you squint hard enough Aramco is technically a Silicon Valley startup, with beginnings in San Francisco that was one of the largest IPOs of 2020.
It looks like the company that became Aramco was Chevron, which was a result of Standard Oil's break up. So not sure I'd call it a startup. But if I squint even harder, and I consider their investment to simply be VC money, then it sorta makes sense, but if I squinted any harder my eyes would be fully closed. Am I missing something?
Nope you aren't, it's already a pretty wild stretch of the imagination; it's just a fun anecdote.
Did the Queen/US commit a coup d'etat? Or did Boris commit the coup and try to become a dictator by not stepping down when legally required to?
That is exactly what happened in Iran, if you replace "Queen" with "Shah" and "Boris" with "Mossadegh".
This seem disingenuous as you completely remove the motivations of the actors. You forgot the part where the US bribes the queen to dissolve the parliament so that Boris doesn't nationalize British Petroleum. That's a HUGE detail that you are handwaving away.
So yes, if the US bribed the queen to dissolve parliament because the people of UK democratically decided to nationalize BP, that would be a very bad thing even though the queen "has the absolute right to do" so.
Also the part where the CIA pays for and stages a coup attempt just so that it can use it as a pretext to use other forces that it is also paying to suppress the armed uprising on behalf of the Queen, with the resulting security situation being the public pretext used for the disillusion of parliament.
No, she doesn't, at least by what appears to be the dominant constitutional theory (not having a simple written Constitution makes this...less clear than one might want it to be.) The Crown does, sure, but the particular category of Crown powers this falls into is that it is validly exercised by the Queen/King-in-Council; that is, by and with the advice and consent of the Privy Council, not unilaterally.
> Did the Queen/US commit a coup d'etat?
Yes.
But yes, it's entirely historical reasons. America used to actually be allied with Iran back when it was a monarchy; and this in particular is a good chunk of the reason why the two countries hate each other. The CIA in particular tried to fuck over the country and it backfired, hard. So Iran decided, instead of allying itself with the first (America) or second (USSR) world, they'd become a theocratic democracy. Once we successfully pissed off Iran; our backup solution was to ally with Saudi Arabia and Israel. Yes, the same Saudi Arabia that had just embargoed the US for being too pro-Israel a few years prior. Geopolitics is weird.
(One thing I do want to point out is that you may be measuring the gender equality of an entire country by the gender equality of it's computer programming staff. This is a mistake: those properties are inversely proportional. Iran sends more women computer programmers abroad because it's so gender unequal. In contrast, very gender-equal countries tend to produce fewer women computer programmers. Iran isn't a bastion of feminism, it's just not as bad as it's neighboring countries. In terms of gender equality, Iran is more of an Alabama than a Sweden.)
The grandparent asked for "Why does America support Saudi Arabia when Iran is more in line with American values", and in that particular case the answer is almost entirely "CIA Bad", possibly with a dash of "right wingers use other countries' right wingers as an excuse to hate those countries".
Absolutely not. Middle and upper class Iranians absolutely love America.
Never been to Saudi but I doubt their people hate America as well.
(I agree with the rest of your comment though)
Source: Iranian
So, as a generalization for most of the country, his statement is correct. Unless you dismiss the lower classes as disposable riffraff as the Shah did.
First, a massive portion of the population (middle and upper class) are also considerable and they _dont_ hate America.
Second, the working class doesn't hate America. I was born and grown up in Iran and I've never seen _anyone_ actually having strong negative feelings towards the US. I don't think Iranian working class thinks about US as much as Americans are lead to believe.
Look, I happen to have a very high opinion of Iranians and Iranian society. I think you are one of the most sophisticated people in the world (though, note, sophisticated and sophism share the same root ;). I think the Ayatollahs have, in many ways, perverted Iranian society (in others ways ensured it's independence). But your statement is too simple, too lacking in nuance. It is, frankly, dangerous (but I'll defend your right to share them with my life!) in the same way that statements about Iraqi's perception of America were 20 years ago.
Long Version:
"I was born and grown up in Iran "
I figured, but I didn't want to bring it up; if you're going to talk about "lived experiences" then it's fair that I ask you what your social class you belong to in Iran. Were you the son/daughter of an engineer? Or were you the child of a manual laborer? Did you grow up in Tehran, or Shiraz? Or did you grow up in a small village in the middle of nowhere? Did you have foreign DVDs when you grew up?
More succinctly, did your class make or was it depicted in "Children of Heaven"? (deserved the Oscar, btw. It was brilliant)
"First, a massive portion of the population (middle and upper class) are also considerable"
Well, doesn't that implies that the Ayatollahs did well by Iran? In the times of the Shah the middle class was proportionally small, certainly not large enough to make OP's comment wrong. (The answer is no, the Ayatollahs were a disaster and Iran's middle class, even if it numbers in the millions, is still a small fraction of the total population)
" and they _dont_ hate America."
OK, here I'll concede you're probably partially right but only because "America" is very ill defined. How can someone "hate" Akron OH? You can despise them, but hate? Ohioans are the nicest people I've met in the world (lived experience from growing up in four continents)! But, typically, when ppl talk about hating "America" they are referring to DC and DC's policies.
> Look, I happen to have a very high opinion of Iranians and Iranian society. I think you are one of the most sophisticated people in the world
Thank you. I don't have such high opinion we're quite average, but thanks.
You are absolutely right that my observations are only a tiny fraction and quite subjective. But that doesn't mean they can be fully dismissed.
Go to youtube and search for Americans or European's impressions of Iran when they visited. Some of them are at very rural parts [0], and yet, they are so warmly welcomed. And don't be fooled. Iranians can be horrible people. Just see how we treat Afghans. It's pretty damn embarrassing. But to Americans, I've never heard a single bad experience from a European/American in Iran.
From reading your posts, I'm pretty much sure we're on the same page. Except that it implies that you think Iranian working class do hate america, whatever that means, and that doesn't seem aligned from what I experienced or from what I've heard from other people's experiences.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2LEgowbzSc This is a great example of a visitor going through "children of heaven" class of Iran. There are countless examples of this.
You might want to research this point more deeply.
A big problem point for US with Iran : the latter's issue with Israel.
It is really only once Iraq was defeated, that Israel turned hard against Iran. Israel is simply always against the biggest potential power in the middle east.
Iran has multiple times put these things up for negotiation but the US has systematically refused such attempts.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/world/middleeast/iran-pre...
Iran is in the doghouse because they nationalized their oil, same as Venezuela. Cuba under the US-backed Batista dictatorship makes the current communist regime there look like a country run by Mister Rogers, but Batista played ball so it was an ally.
International relations in general are characterized by an amoral state of anarchy, there is no right and wrong, only suzerains and clients.